And it is as a cultural traveller that he now sits here, strapped in an aisle seat of an Ilyushin on the airport at Slaka, waiting to enter the world outside. He has left behind him, two time zones back, under different birdlife and a different ideology, a habitat of sorts: a small office in a Bradford college, lined with books, where he teaches the vowel-shift and the speech-act to students of many nationalities, including his own; a small, fairly modern brick house of faintly rising property values on a bus-route convenient both for the college and the city; in the house, a quantity of contemporary, which is to say already out-of-date, furniture; and a dark wife, contemporary too, a woman of waning affections, bleakly hungry for a revelation, evidently disillusioned, in these therapeutic times, with . . . well, what? It is a little shaming to say that he does not quite know, for his instincts are decent; but with him, perhaps, or the role of helpmeet-slave, or the patriarchial enslavement of women in society, or the incapacity of the marital orgasm to make all life endlessly interesting, or her own ageing, or his absences, both symbolic and actual; a small sad wife in Laura Ashley dresses, who writes many letters to undisclosed friends, and belongs to Weightwatchers, who reads horoscopes in old newspapers, paints paintings of no recognizable, or at least recognized, merit in the lumber room, drinks solitary glasses of sherry at odd hours of the day or night, and sits for long hours in a sunchair in the garden, as if waiting – or so it appears to Petworth, as he peers, when he is there and not here, through the curtains of his high upstairs study at the lonely figure in the lounger – to be a widow, who makes him feel guilty when, as then, he is present, and quite as guilty when, as now, he is not.
He has also left behind, under another sky, in pouring rain, an England in fits of Royal Wedding. For this is the very late summer of 1981, one of the lesser years, a time of recession and unemployment, decay and deindustrialization. The age of Sado-Monetarism has begun; in the corridors of power, they are naming the money supply after motorways, M1 and M2 and M3, to try to map its mysteries better. The bombs explode in Ulster, the factories close, but it has been a ceremonial summer; the patriotic bunting has flown, the Royal couple whose images are everywhere have walked the aisle. The nuptials, it seems, have been celebrated much by foreigners, come for the season to enjoy the splendour and stability of British traditions, and the collapse of the coin. Shards and fragments, chaos and Babel; so summer London has seemed to Petworth as, up from the provinces the previous night, he taxied through it on the way to his hotel near Victoria. In Oxford Street, bannered and decorated, where the kerbside touts sell laurelled mugs with Royals on them and small signs that say ‘Oxford Street,’ the shoppers in the busy stores are mostly Arabs, buying twelve of everything, evidently furnishing the desert. By Buckingham Palace, the hi-tech cameras snapping the Changing of the Guard are mostly held by Japanese – reasonably enough, since their skills made them in the first place. In the lobby of the Victoria hotel, the clerk speaks only Portuguese, and that not well; burnouses are mingling with stetsons, Hausa with Batak. In the high third-floor bedroom, no bigger than a wardrobe, where Petworth unpacks, the electric kettle which would once have been a maid offers instructions for use in six languages, none of them his. In the street, black whores in sunglasses and short tunics laugh in doorways, vibrators prod their plastic rocketry up in the sex-shop windows, and a troubled, chaotic noise of shouting people and police sirens sounds as he goes to dine on an American-style hamburger.
In the morning, after a breakfast of teabag and Coffeemate, London seems a fancy fiction, a disorderly parade of styles. There are Vidal Sassoon haircuts and Pierre Cardin ties in the Lancias halted at the traffic lights; meanwhile youths pass on the pavement with pink cropheads and safety-pins stuck through their ears. Green-headed girls with red-patch faces in clown’s pantaloons and parachute suits walk along; a young black with his hair in a string bag skates by in headphones, with wires going down into his clothes, listening to his own insides. ‘We’ll take more care of you,’ say the BA posters at Victoria, where Petworth gets on the single-decker Airbus; chadored Iranian women sit there, carrying designer dresses in plastic bags from Harrod’s, beneath advertisements for home pregnancy testing, computer dating, the joys of being a personal assistant to an assistant person. The bus pulls out into Sunday London streets, past pizza places, topless sauna parlours, unisex jeans outlets. Vandalism marks the spaces, graffiti the walls, where the council pulls down old substandard housing, to replace it with new substandard housing. ‘Fly poundstretcher to Australia,’ cry the posters by the flyover, shining with sweatless girls in bikinis, drinking drinks with ice in in other people’s bright sunshine; rain falls over factories which stand empty with broken windows. Beer advertisements display half-timbered cottages and old grey churches, the England of the heart; rubbish and abandoned cars litter the hard shoulder of the motorway out to the airport.
And at Heathrow, that city in the desert, the summer’s stylistic pluralism has chaos added. The late summer tourists who have fed the economy are massing to go home; the assistant air traffic controllers, calling for their annual gold benison, have gone on strike. In the upper air, planes bleep for attention and, finding none, go elsewhere; below, on the wet pavements, a few strikers sit outside the European terminal, their legs out in front of them, holding a sign saying OFFICIAL PICKET, watched by one policeman. In front of Petworth, the automatic doors open, then close on his foot; inside the great sounding terminal, the summer spectacle is held in a state of suspended animation. Some flights are cancelled, yet more delayed, yet more uncertain; the crowds are gathered in confusion. Germans and Swedes, French and Dutch, Arabs and Indians, Americans and Japanese, sit on chairs, lie on benches, wheel suitcases round on small fold-up wheels, push airport carts here and there, laden with bags from Lord John and Harrod’s, Marks & Spencer and Simpson, wear jeans, wear tartan pants, wave tickets, quarrel at check-in counters, wear yashmaks, wear kimonos, buy Playboy, buy La Stampa, wear beards, wear Afros, wear uncut hair under turbans, buy Airport, buy Ulysses, request The History Man but cannot get it, buy cassette recorders, model guardsmen, Lady Di pens from W. H. Smith, hold dolls, carry tennis rackets in Adidas bags, struggle with backpacks, hold up wardrobe bags, chatter into red telephones of modern design devised to make conversation impossible, wear safari suits, wear flowing robes, wear furs, wear headbands, wear tarbooshes, wear cagoules, sit on stools, eye girls, comb curls, tote small babies, hug old ladies, furiously smoke Gauloises or Players, gather in crowds in hallways or on stairs, depart, led by blue stewardesses carrying large clipboards, in the direction of aircraft, and then, led by yellow stewardesses carrying small clipboards, back into the lounge again. Meanwhile, amid the post-Bauhaus chairs, the sounding spaces, the crying children, the meaningless announcements, a few Indian ladies in baggy pants, the only stable residents of the transient place, sweep the floors and empty the flowing ashtrays with an air of resigned and stoical patience.
Pushing hopelessly through the crowd around the BA check-in desk, Petworth manages to show his Comflug ticket. The girl behind the counter, busy fending off passengers, has no promises at all to offer; but, strangely, she does tag his blue suitcase with a tag that says SLK, feeds it into a metal maw that tastes and then digests it, and hands him a boarding pass, to go on to Immigration. Near the channel is the window of a bank; Petworth halts for a moment, wondering whether to get vloskan, but if he does not fly he will not need it, and if he does he will be met. He passes on, through the bottleneck of Immigration, into the stateless, duty-free hinterland beyond. ‘Say Hello to the Good Buys at Heathrow,’ declare the bright yellow signs on the shining duty-free shop, packed with glossy goods at their special prices. He looks at the long swatches of tartan and tweed, the Dunhill lighters and Jaeger scarves; he picks up a basket and wanders beneath the anti-theft mirrors, inspecting the bright bottles of Scotch and London Dry Gin, the long cartons of Players and Dunhills, the cans of Three Nuns and Player’s Navy Cut – elegant British institutio
ns laid out here, much perhaps like the strike itself, to spare the lazy traveller the need ever to step out beyond the small country of the airport in order to find them. The loudspeakers do not loudspeak; wandering, with nothing to do except buy, Petworth buys – a bottle of Teacher’s whisky, a long thin carton of Benson and Hedges’ cigarettes, delivered in a sealed bag he must not open until he gets onto the plane he may never get onto, the goodies of travel, which travel itself, that ultimate neurosis, makes us need.
Later, Petworth leans against a convenient bar, a pimplesized English Scotch at his elbow, watching the flight-boards flutter desperately, the television information screens judder and go blank, as they rake the codes inside themselves for signs that are more than redundancy, waiting for his plane to take off or not, as the case may be. On the digital clock, flight-time comes and goes; Petworth orders another Scotch and finds himself caught by an old and nameless fear – the fear of being trapped here, for eternity, in the unassigned, stateless space between all the countries, condemned to live for ever in a cosmopolitan nowhere, on clingfilm-wrapped sandwiches, duty-free whisky, Tiptree’s jam. It is a fate he knows he deserves; he is a man who has spent his life circling around and away from domestic interiors, hovering between home, where he sits and thinks, and abroad, where he talks and drinks. Travel is a manic cycle, with abroad the manic phase, home the depressive; there is some strange adrenalin that draws him into the fascination and the void of foreignness, with its plurality of sensation, its sudden spaces and emptinesses. He travels, he thinks, for strangeness, disorientation, multiplication and variation of the self; yet he is not a good traveller, abhorring tours and guides and cathedrals, hating cafés and beaches, resenting brochures and itineraries, preferring food in his room to exposed meals in public restaurants. He is a man given to sitting silently in the one good armchair in dull hotel bedrooms, smoking, drinking, thinking, improving his lectures, analysing, without conclusion, his relationships, inspecting what in some quarters might pass for his soul, peeping through blinds or curtains at the street-scene below, and waiting – for a happy interruption, a small invitation to work or entertainment, a step outside beyond the world of depression and anxiety, the world in which he feels that he, in this case, is not the case.
It is busy and confused in the departure lounge; well-suited businessmen stand waiting impatiently with Samsonite executive cases, fine women walk past in Gucci scarves and tight lamé trousers, those special exotic airport women one may always see but never have. The flight-boards are fluttering again, in a jumble of letters and digits, a chaos of signs. But, look, they are settling, out of redundancy is coming word: COMFLUG says the board, and 155, and SLAKA, and NOW BOARDING. He sets aside his glass; he picks up his briefcase, his overcoat, his yellow duty-free bag; he sets off down the long dreary tunnels of Sunday Heathrow – past moving walkways, now not moving; past bright advertisements from Smith’s, displaying old Chester and the White Cliffs of Dover, Windermere with a steamboat, Wales with a sheep, the Britain he is not and has scarcely ever been in; past advertisements for Seiko watches that are programmed to the year 2000, when they will collectively stop. Luggage trolleys with squeaking wheels follow him along the linoleum; great arms prod off from the corridor into disconnected space; planes like stranded whales stand unmoving beyond the windows; ‘Your Palace in the Sky,’ says an Air India jumbo with Taj Mahalled windows, firmly trapped on the ground. He enters a lounge where his luggage is taken and X-rayed, by a machine that will not harm the film in your camera; an electronic Aeolian harp is passed under his armpit and across the secrecies of his groin. In the chairs sit his fellow-travellers, a group unlike the great display outside: men in brown suits, with flat, grainy faces, elderly ladies in black dresses with small cardboard boxes, several quiet children, a silent stoical baby. They sit without speaking; they rise in neat order when the stewardess comes to lead them down the long bending arm onto the wet tarmac, where a modernist bus with fizzing doors waits to drive them past catering trucks, police cars, petrol tankers, flights of steps going nowhere, toward the aircraft that awaits them.
The Ilyushin has been parked like a secret in some distant corner of the airport; two bottle-green stewardesses wait for them to get off the bus. They allow the passengers up the steps two at a time; in the cabin, two more stewardesses wait to seat them all in careful rows, filling each place in order, as if they are packing a box of persons. LUPI LUPI, NOKI ROKI says the illuminated sign on the forward bulkhead; a dismal martial music plays through the intercom. The luggage racks are of string, the seats high and stiff. Petworth straps himself into an aisle seat; between him and the window are two brown-suited men who smell quite strongly of onion. The aisle is narrow; at the back of the plane there is a section shut off by a green curtain, to which none of the passengers seem to be allowed access. The travellers sit very quietly; the stewardesses check them very carefully; the doors are closed, the service trucks underneath them slide away. It is quiet in the cabin, and a red bus moves on the road to Hounslow; then the engines fire and roar. An announcement in a language Petworth does not know comes through the intercom: the plane taxis a little, and then stops, taxis a little more, and then stops again. Then, suddenly, the plane’s body throbs, and there is the great dash into airspeed; they leap a fence, overarch a wet bus, overfly a wet reservoir and a field of waste; London, that fancy plural fiction, tips crazily into sight through the opposite window. Then it is gone, the red buses, the big city, the Heathrow strike, the Royal Wedding, the topless saunas, the dark wife; clouds come round, rain runs down the windows, and Petworth is indeed going to Slaka.
III
In all cultures, Petworth is very shortly to be found reflecting – a man rising into the clouds somewhere above Gravesend or Dover – planes are much the same sort of thing: long metal tubes containing persons. In all cultures, planes may be overbooked or, like Comflug 155, take off, for whatever reason, late. In all cultures, stewardesses, those couturiered nurses, may suffer from swollen ankles, menstrual cramps, or shortened tempers exacerbated by repeated encounters with foolish, bleating travellers; in all cultures, airline food seems to come from the same universal source, stewed in the same universal sauce. Plane travel makes all life alike; yet inside likeness there is difference. Thus, even now, after just a few minutes in the air, there is something about Comflug that makes it definitely Comflug. The same things that all airlines do have been done, the same grammar of flying followed. So ‘Attention,’ the pilot has said, just after takeoff, addressing the cabin in several languages, his, Russian, German, and Petworth’s native English, ‘Welcome here please on Comflug 155, destiny Slaka. We shall flight at a high of ninety-two pornys, airspeed forty vlods an hour. Our delay is because of economic inconsistencies in Britain, so we do not apologize. Through window, notice please grey sky and raining. For Slaka, forecast very sunny. In disaster, always obedience please your stewardess.’ Yes, it is the same but not quite the same, just as the seats seem just a little narrower and higher than usual, the stewardesses a little firmer and more given to hair in the nostrils, the passengers a little quieter and rather less mobile.
More familiarities follow; at the front of the cabin a small balletic display has started, conducted by two stewardesses, short fat ladies in high hard hats. ‘Tenti sifti inburdi,’ says, through the intercom, the voice of some unseen female impresario; from behind their backs the two stewardesses have produced brightly coloured cards and are waving them gaily in the air. ‘Plazsci otvatu immerg’nicina proddo flugsi frolikat,’ says the voice; the ladies suddenly rise up onto their toes, put out both their arms, rotate their wrists in a complicated gesture, and point with sharp fingers at various corners of the cabin. ‘Flattin umper stuli, op immerg’nicina,’ says the voice on the intercom. Magically, the ladies summon up from nowhere bright plastic tunics of yellow, and draw them over their heads, tying them carefully at the waist. ‘Imper flattin tuggu taggii,’ announces the voice. The two ladies suddenly turn their b
acks to the cabin, prod out their dumpy behinds, and give mock-tugs to the rear of their plastic tunics. Then they take off the tunics; ‘Mas’kayii icks’gen flipiflopa,’ says the voice. The ladies now hold up in their hands curious, clear plastic objects, out of which dangles a yellow hose. ‘Vono icks’gen uskaka por prusori, ot noki roki,’ says the voice. The ladies put the yellow plastic hoses to their faces, and suck at them erotically. Then, as suddenly as it has begun, the dance collapses; the stewardesses put away their props and resume their normal duties, walking up and down the aisle. Familiarity breeds familiarity; Petworth puts out his hand and stops one of the stewardesses, overcome by a primal bodily urge. ‘Ha?’ cries the stewardess, a very heavy lady with hair in her nostrils, looking down at him. ‘Are you serving drinks now?’ asks Petworth, ‘I’d like one.’ ‘Va?’ says the stewardess, staring down on him severely, as if stewardesses are really not meant to be spoken to, ‘Kla?’
Perhaps it is language that poses the problem: ‘Drinks trolley,’ says Petworth, raising an invisible glass to his lips, ‘Whisky soda? Ginnitoniki?’ ‘Ah, na, na,’ says the stewardess, looking at him critically, ‘Is not permitted.’ ‘Not permitted?’ says Petworth. ‘Only permitted is a Vichy,’ says the stewardess. ‘Very well,’ says Petworth, ‘I’ll have that.’ ‘Na,’ says the stewardess, ‘No now.’ ‘Oh, when?’ asks Petworth. ‘Another day,’ says the stewardess, ‘Tomorrow. Now is Sunday.’ ‘I see,’ says Petworth, leaning back in his seat, a man in a chair in the air over Brussels, perhaps, or Paris, trying to understand what the difference is. It seems to him that in the West, which is where he comes from, flying is invested usually with a sort of magical fictionality, an erotic and pleasurable texture. Economic forces clearly explain this: capitalist competition requires that a certain happy disguise, a sense of delights available here and nowhere else, be cast over all the gross and diurnal reality. So, on the planes, stewardesses serve drink and bargain-like commodities, offer smiles and adulterous glances, promises of intimate excess, display made-up faces and nice legs, utter cries of ‘Enjoy your flight’ and ‘Fly us again sometime’ and ‘Have a nice day.’ Indeed they transmit what a linguist – and perhaps it should be explained that Petworth, a man in the sky over Dusseldorf, or Strasburg, is actually himself a linguist – calls phatic communion, which is to say non-verbal intercourse, speechless communication, the kind of thing that babies and lovers, teachers and animals constantly use. But that is under capitalism, and such false allurements and disguises are evidently not necessary on Comflug, where a more rational economy prevails. So, it seems, drinks are not to be offered, nor food, nor friendship; indeed the stewardesses have now disappeared entirely, apparently behind the green curtain at the back of the plane, and the rest of the passengers are sitting stiffly, clearly expecting nothing at all.
Rates of Exchange Page 4
